YouSaid · the spoken record

Dhanji R. Prasanna

lines on the record: 98
first: 2025-10-26
most recent: 2025-10-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, it's the classic 80 20 problem. And we have that enough with the apps that we build for our customers. Know like we'll build some great experiments that really resonate, and then we have to spend a lot of time ironing out the long tail of problems. So in Cashcard, for example, we built the entire functionality of CacheCard, I would say pretty much in a weekend or maybe a week of sort of integration and work. And then it took a really long time to iron out all these edge cases where someone would tip twice the value of the bill and then it would completely break something in the back end or people would use it as a gas station and they have a different way of billing your card. And to your point, I would go always come back to like, what is the reason we're doing this? Why does it matter to us and to our customers? And if it doesn't clearly satisfy that.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there's a trap in getting away from your core purpose as a company and our core purpose is economic empowerment. So getting customers or merchants or artists the ability to make a sale or pay their rent or upload their latest creation to title. And I think that Anything that serves that purpose, we should encourage and we should invest in. But if we're just purely looking at dollars versus dollars, then that's like pulling us off that purpose. The savings and cost that there might be in replacing a vendor tool by something you build in-house is probably not worth it in the mental bandwidth that you've lost and the amount of the team sort of technical focus that's being taken away. So, yeah, I would say it's just keep coming back to the thing that matters to you as a company. And then the rest is, you know, we'll follow from that.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is any of this necessary? Like, if we just change the process, do we even need to think about building tools? And this is the thing that AI isn't good at. It's not able to have this sort of portfolio judgment or judgment across a global sense of what's important and what matters. So a lot of times I tell teams just question like the base assumption, particularly our info sec teams, because they'll twist themselves into knots sometimes trying to secure something and you'll be like, well, just ask the team that's building it to do it differently or to not build that at all if it doesn't matter. And then you won't have to increase your surface area of security it. So I think those are the areas where it's better for a human to use judgment and AI has not done a great job.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say it was more around. Things like process automation or a lot of times I'll get this sort of request where a team will say we need to buy this new tool from this vendor because our current tool isn't doing X, Y, and Z. And another team will say, no, no, we can just use Goose to build an app that will, you know, do the same thing for us in half the time or bless. And then As a human, you're sitting there thinking,”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think we're going to be there. I do think we're going to need a lot of human. To anchor these AIs so they don't go off script, to be honest. And that's really where our design lead and our design teams are pushing us to think. And that's a differentiator that I think will push us beyond this era of AI slop that everyone's talking about. So yeah, it's very much like anchoring it into a thing that matters to people and the thing that's tasteful and useful and has value.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes it kind of goes off the script entirely, and you have to sort of pull it back a bit. So I think we're not quite at that era where it's completely self-improving and completely autonomous. But I do think we're in a transition phase where we can give it that nudge and say, hey, here's my wish list of 10 things that I wish you could do. Go and figure out the best way to do them. And it's successful, I would say, on like 60% of those things if the features are well enough described and it struggles on the remaining 40 where you have to kind of intervene and massage it.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's true. I was actually literally trying what you're saying just last week. And so I have this new version of Goose that we're working on. And I was asking it to come up with ideas to improve itself and implement it overnight.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The trick is getting the AI to respect all of those incremental Yeah, and sort of like bake those in as As a part of the specification, if you will.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that you're going to see instead of us, for example, refactoring an app to have a different UI or to evolve into its new version, we're just going to rewrite that app from scratch. And one of the things I'm really pushing our teams to think about is what would our world look like if every single release RM minus RF like deleted the entire app and rebuilt it from scratch. And so we can't really do that today, but I think this shows you some of the direction of what's possible and where these tools are taking us.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Limited bandwidth and a lot of coordination overhead. So we would have to choose the best path to try in an experiment. And I don't think we need that anymore. We need instead to be able to describe multiple different experiments in a great amount of detail. And then maybe we go to sleep. And then in the morning, all those experiments are built and we can sort of throw away five or six of them. So one of the things that I do regularly, so I write code every day, but one of the things that I do regularly is just throw away huge, huge amounts of code. And it's kind of hard for me because I've never done that before. I mean, obviously engineers love deleting code, but this is different. You build a whole new system or whole new feature and you're like, oh, it doesn't feel exactly right. I'm just going to delete and start over. So I think you're going to see a lot more of that way of working.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that we're going to see much more autonomy. So we're working on a couple of experiments with Goose, with the next version of Goose, where we're really trying to push it to work not just for two or three or five minutes at a time, our median session length is five minutes and on average seven, but we're trying to push it to hours. We're trying to say, hey, all these LLMs are sitting idle overnight and on weekends while humans aren't there. There's no need for that. They should be working all the time. They should be trying to build in anticipation of what we want. If we go back to the earlier part of the conversation. But also, I think that they should be able to build in ways that were never possible before as humans, we had limited resources.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of it is dependent on the improvement of LLM performance, but I can tell you the way I'm trying to change how I work and how I'm trying to change our immediate team's way of working. So I think vibe coding has been an interesting, exciting thing, which is you talk to a chatbot essentially and it goes and builds software for you. But I think this is highly limiting. It's very ping-pong. Like you do something, you wait for three or four minutes and it comes back with something sort of half baked and you have to nudge it and guide it and massage it to get where it needs to be.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Able to No, it's not. He's someone that I've worked with for a long time and he's been at Block for a long time. He just loves experimenting and he embodies that culture of experimentation just like our creator of Goose, who did the same thing.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so these are things that I think we were waiting for the calendar vendor to build as features into calendar, but we don't need to do that anymore because AI is able to orchestrate this for us.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so voice is the other big part of it. It has voice processing capability. So it's always listening to what he's saying as well and trying to interpret that Would say that This is mostly an experiment, you know, given that he's on our core goose team and he contributes to Goose, so he has a day job. This is a kind of thing on the side that he was developing. So once this evolves into more of a native feature of Goose itself or other tools that we use in the enterprise, I think it can have a lot of legs. But it's already pretty good. I mean, it's probably cutting down enormous amounts of busy work that he has to do. So for example, one thing he'll do is he'll say, oh, I have a meeting conflict. I can't make it that time or I have to go pick up my kid. And Goose will automatically reschedule that meeting without him ever sort of sitting in front of his calendar and clicking through 10 times.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meeting and he's late for something else. It sort of comes up with these creative things that he didn't program or he didn't write prompts for, but that it thinks will help him improve his productivity or improve his workday. So yeah, it's pretty crazy. You have to have the stomach for it to be that level of tied into your working tools. But it kind of shows you what's possible with tools like this.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. So he is very, very AI focused and he's trying to extract all these crazy ideas from Goose. And Goose can do all of the things that I described through specific interactions with tools, but it can also just watch your screen. So it understands how to process images and process the things that it's looking at through screenshots. And so he built this system where it's essentially just watching everything he does all the time. And he'll be talking to a colleague on Slack or an email and they'll be discussing some feature that they think is useful to implement. And then a few hours later, he'll find that Goose has already tried to build that feature and open a PR for it on Git. And all sorts of other wacky things like that. So it'll try to nudge him out of a workflow if he's running over on him.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goose is a top gun reference. So, what our engineer that came up with it, he also looks exactly like Goose. So it's kind of crazy if you put them side to side. He's going to be really embarrassed with my sharing this, but that's the reason why I call it Goose. And then we went into the whole birds theme after that.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we believe in the power of open source. And our core, one of our core missions is to increase openness. And that means contributing to open protocols and contributing to open source. And as a tech company, we're built on a lot of open source software. I think pretty much every tech company is, whether you're talking about Linux or Java or MySQL or any of these essential components. And so we feel like we have a strong imperative to give back. We want to build things that not only are good for us and our customers, but that outlast block and outgrow block. That's certainly a core value for us and has been from the beginning, even long before this whole AI phase. So yeah, Goose follows in that proud tradition. And yeah, we're very excited that it's had the success it's had.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and we have a lot of companies using Goose pretty actively. I don't want to name too many names, but from our competitors to our sort of close partners, a lot of them are using Goose pretty regularly on their teams. I know Databricks talks about it a lot, but everyone you can think of in this mid-tech tier is using Goose information. That's insane.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we allow our engineers and our general employee population to use any tools that they want. Goose is the one that's most well integrated into all of our systems because it's built on the MCP and it's so easy to create an MCP for an existing system. So for example, if you're using an issue tracking tool and you want some AI automation added to it, Before Goose, our teams would have to wait for the vendor to build that AI capability in there, or maybe there's some way in which OpenAI or Anthropic or Google would provide general purpose capability where we could plug those in. But with Goose, that's no longer necessary. With a few lines of code that an MCP represents, all these systems are orchestratable with AI basically overnight. And Goose can write its own MCPs. So it's pretty bootstrappable as well.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Python code on your desktop to do all that, it will generate some graphs using some JavaScript charting library that it knows about. And then finally, it'll put this all into a PDF or Google Doc or whatever, and it can even email it for you or upload it somewhere. And it's doing all of this on its own, by the way. No one's sitting here telling it that. You're just saying, hey, I want this report. I want this emailed here. I want these pretty charts. And it's orchestrating across all these systems.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it can use any model. So we have a pluggable provider system and you can either bring your own API keys and use the Claude family models or OpenAI's family models. Or you can use open source models and you can download them and use them directly or via OLAMA and other, there are several tools that help you do that. But essentially it's taking the capability of these models to generate text and to interpret text and applying them to real world situations. So one example that I really like is you can ask Goose to go and build your marketing report and it has MCPs to connect to Snowflake and Tableau and Looker. So it'll write SQL to pull out data from there. It'll do some analysis in a CSV so it can write.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anthropic came up with that we were a very early contributor to. And the model context protocol is very simply just a set of formalized wrappers around existing tools or existing capabilities. So if you have tools So, until that point, the LLMs were not really able to do much other than chat, but Goose gives these brains arms and legs to go out and act in our digital world. And that's where we find it's had most impact. And it's built on this fairly open protocol that anyone can implement. There have been an explosion of MCPs, goose is entirely open source, by the way. So any of you can download it and extend it. write your own mcps and that's that's been our core success is through goose”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Goose is a general purpose AI agent. So you can think of it as a desktop tool or a program that you can download and install on your computer. And then it has a UI. You can talk to it just like a chatbot. And you can say anything from Hey Goose, organize my photos by category. And it has the ability to look within your photos. you know if there are a lot of trees, it'll organize them as nature photos. If there are a lot of people, it'll organize them as portraiture, all of this sort of stuff to writing software for you. So it can do all of these tasks. And the way we've been able to do this is through something called a model context protocol, which or the MCP, which a lot of your listeners might have heard. And this is something that”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That metric is across all teams, so that would be Like our support teams, our legal teams, our risk teams, all of them together. And then on the engineering side, it's very variable because, like I said before, it matters how big and how complex the code base is. And so if you're building a totally new Greenfields code base or you're building an app for a new platform, then we're seeing those pretty aggressive gains. in very complex code bases that already exist those gains are not quite there yet”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The companies that aren't feeling the success in AI are trying to just throw these tools at their giant code bases and hoping good things will happen. And that's not how it's playing out. Eventually, I do think it'll get there, but right now we're still in the early utility phase.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we use that for automating UI tests. So before you would have to hire an army of contractors or QAs who would go and click through every screen. But now we can just bake those into automated tests and then give you like a report at the end. So we're seeing a lot of advantages in those types of areas. But where you have a lot of depth and a lot of like really strong people come together is where AI, I think, still underperforms humans. And that's something that's probably going to get better over time, but it's also something where we should lean into as humans. So when you have some very senior engineers and they're thinking about things like architecture and design and race conditions, orchestration, things like this, that's still an area where AI isn't quite there. And so I think”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Productivity gain in. The other area which I'm really excited about is we have this other tool called Gosling, which is a goose for mobile, effectively. So it operates your Android OS at a native level using the accessibility API.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you an example. One area in which we find that it's really good is for non-technical teams to be able to build little software tools for themselves. So this has been one of the most surprising and energizing uses of Goose within Block is we'll have our enterprise risk management team build a whole system for self-servicing enterprise risk. And this is compressing like weeks of work into hours ordinarily they would be waiting for an internal apps team or something to go and build that and they would put that on their Q2 roadmap and everyone would be twiddling their thumbs until it all clicked into place. But now you can just go and do it. And so a lot of these kinds of use cases we're seeing an enormous amount of”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Across the whole company, we're probably trending towards 20 to 25 percent of manual hours saved. And I think that's just the start of all of this. I do feel that the more AI native companies are doing a better job of realizing this. So companies that started just with AIs, startups mostly. But there is some truth to this notion that AI isn't a panacea and it's growing as well, right, in capability. So you need to ride that wave along with it. And I think a lot of the companies aren't realizing this. They're like, well, where's the value? And the truth is the value is changing every day. And so you need to be adaptable and look at what the value is today and plan for what the value will be tomorrow. And then slowly expand to the areas where it's more.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our number one priority is to automate block, which means getting AI and getting AI forms of automation throughout our entire company. And we feel that that's just at the beginning of where the utility is with all these large language models. And I think we're going to continue to see that improve. But even now we find engineering teams that are very, very AI forward that are using Goose every day are reporting about eight to 10 hours saved per week. And this is self-reported. And then we also have a number of check metrics to try and validate that. So we look at PRs, we look at throughput of features, we look at a whole bunch of things. And we have our data scientists come up with a complicated formula that tries to distill it all into something meaningful. And we...”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To build patches while engineers are asleep, so they come in the next day and look at it. I would say there are a number of ways in which they're different, but different teams have adapted in different ways depending on how close they are to the tools.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the small, certain teams that are very, very AI natives or teams that are building AI first everywhere are working much differently than before because they're using vibe code tools and they're essentially building without writing lines of code by hand. And that just wasn't true two to three years ago. I don't think it was true anywhere in the world. So that's dramatically different. In teams that are still working with very heavy legacy code bases, it's less true, but they're also encountering these sort of background AI processes. So we have these tools that run 24-7 or run in the CI pipeline, and they're analyzing vulnerabilities. They're looking at even bugs filed on tickets and trying.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so all those things are different now. I'm not saying it's perfect, there's still a long road ahead of us, but we at least speak the same language. We all have access to the same tools. We share the same policies. So like a certain level of senior engineer means the same thing across the whole company. People can move from one team to another into an area of need. All of these things are very different. But to sum it up, I would say we're technically focused and we're focused on advancing technical excellence as a goal and not just really wasn't that true two to three years ago. There were other things we were optimizing for Ben.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not everyone was on board. I'll tell you that it was quite a painful transformation. I think that one of the things that I learned the most throughout this process is that Conway's law can be really, really powerful. So it's the law that basically says, you know, you ship your org structure. So what you're organized as in terms of teams, in terms of collaborating groups and your operating model matters a lot to what you build. And so I think that that was essentially the biggest change is we had a lot of momentum in each of these silos, be it Cash App, be it after pay, be it Square, or even title or music streaming service. And no one was really talking to each other. No one was really aligned on technical strategy, on what we even wanted to be five years from now as a collective team.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's pretty much what we did and not to lean too heavily on this, but this is what Jobs did when he came back to Apple as well. He reorganized Apple to be functional. And it wasn't like we were following a playbook. We discovered this as we were investigating what it's going to take to make these teams more tech focused, to bring our DNA back to our roots, which really was putting engineering and design first, which is what technology first means to me. So yeah, I would say to companies, find your DNA and really try to optimize for what that is in a very simple and clear way.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go deep in technology when you really want to connect with these things that are sort of industry changing events that are happening, you need a singular focus. And we changed the organization. So all engineers report into one single team now. All designers report into one single team and there's a single head of engineering, single head of design, et cetera. And so that was the big transformation that we made. And that meant we could really drive forward AI, we could drive forward platform and just technical depths generally.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So when we were in our sort of mature phase, or when Square was working quite well, it was a very large business. And then we had started Cash App and that also followed suit, we had spun them out almost as what we call a GM structure. So they were effectively run as a portfolio of independent companies and they had their own CEOs who all reported to Jack and it was still one single executive team, but they had separate engineering practices. They had separate design teams. They were kind of separate in almost every way except for some shared resources like our foundational resources like legal and some platforms and things like that. So I think that that was very useful for us for the stage of company that we were in. But when you really want to”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were about eight or nine different projects. And we had reinstituted the company-wide hack week. And so all of this just kind of created a little bit of a spark of like, hey, we're building technology again. We're trying to push the frontier again. And that's how it started. And then there were a whole number of steps after that where we went from a GM structure to a functional org structure, which was, I think, the key to making our transformation into being more of an AI native company.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the start, my main focus was to get block to think like a technology company. And for a long time we had had a little bit of, I want to call it identity drift maybe. We were talking about ourselves as a financial services company. Some people called us fintech, all of this stuff. But when I started working at what was then known as Square, we were always thought of as a technology company, just like Google or Facebook or any of the others. And so I wanted to get us back to that. And so the first thing I did was to try and institute a number of programs that focused on that. So everything from getting the top ICs in the company together to talk to each other to starting a whole bunch of special projects. So we got about two to five engineers per project.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, yeah, I was just in fact, I was part time at the time because I had just had a kid and I was coming back in and I was helping out one of the engineering teams. And then Jack came over to Sydney and spent two days with me. And, you know, both of us like long walks. So we walked all around Sydney and talked it through up and down. And then, yeah, he offered me the job. I thought it was a great opportunity once in a lifetime. So I took it.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, about two and a half years ago or so, Jack really felt like things needed to change. I think he had a sense that the industry was going in a different direction. So he got about 40 of the company's top executives into a room on a weekly basis. And they all used to sort of talk everything through that was going on. And he added me to that group. So at some point, I observed that we were talking about lots of deep things, lots of relevant things, but no one was really paying attention to AI. And so that's when I wrote that letter. And to be honest, I think taken on a life of its own, but there wasn't much to the letter other than I think we should do this. I think we should do it centrally. And it's important for us to be ahead of the game and be an AI native company because that's where the industry is heading.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of engineers think that code quality is important to building a successful product. The two have nothing to do with each other”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These LLMs are sitting idle overnight and on weekends while humans aren't there. Like, there's no need for that. They should be working all the time. They should be trying to build in anticipation of what we want.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's been surprising and really amazing to non technical people using AI agents and programming tools to build things the people that are able to embrace it, to optimize for their particular workday and their particular set of tasks are really showing the most impact from these tools.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You'll be talking to a colleague on Slack or an email, and they'll be discussing some features that they think is useful to implement. Now, a few hours later, he'll find that Goose has already tried to build that feature and opened a PR for it on Git.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See a significant amount of games. We find engineering teams that are very, very AI forward are reporting about eight to 10 hours save per week.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source